Going into Business - Lakewood Chassis Co.
Actually, the real birthplace of Lakewood Industries was the basement of my parents home, where I grew up at 1453 Elmwood Avenue, in Lakewood. Ohio, a suburb on Cleveland's west side. The house no longer exists because it was sold to the School district and a school now stands where the house once stood.
The first dragster chassis were built in the basement of that house. It started with an old dinning room table which I made into a fixture for holding steel tubes, while I welded them in place. Steel delivery trucks dropped bundles of the steel tubing onto the front lawn of our house, set in a peaceful residential neighborhood,. This was not only puzzling to the truck driver, but to our neighbors as well.
I struggled with picking a name for my company until one day, I had a conversation with the one of the owners of the filling station at the bottom of my street. The station was called Bill and Zan's. When I told Zan I was struggling for a name, he said that he and his partner found it easy to chose a name because they wanted everyone to know who they were dealing with. He then suggested for me to use my name. No, I said. Joe's Chassis Company sounds a bit goofy and maybe even a little egotistical. Well then, why don't you call it by the name of your street or even the name of your city? Elmwood Chassis Company, not bad, but Lakewood Chassis Company. Hey, now that has a nice ring to it, but who would know what or where Lakewood is? Most of my business would come from out of town and I'd have to tell everyone it was really Cleveland. One thing was for sure though, it was not going to be Cleveland Chassis Company.
I did finally settle on Lakewood, but after all the cards and letterheads were printed, my dad finally figured that it was the welder that was making the picture go fuzzy on the TV screen in the living room and it was out you go Joe. I scrambled to find a desirable location with reasonable rent, but what I came up with was on the Cleveland side of W.117th St. What happened next was a stroke of luck that made all my pondering over a name, seem meaningless.
A Tiger by the tail
The Lakewood Hydro formed Bell-Housing story
While out searching for better way to reduce the welding cost in making the multi-disc clutch housing for my dragsters chassis, I learned of an Aerospace breakthrough for forming metal called hydro-forming,
The process was new and very unique in that it used hydraulic oil pressure to press a flat disc or plate into a deep drawn shape, like a deep cooking pot with a wide flange around the open end. The amazing thing was, it would make this deep drawn shape in seconds and without a scratch in the metal. The Government used the forming process for making nose cones for rockets. The deep drawn shape could be taylor made to fit the engines we used.
Initially I thought only of using this new technology to form the lightweight clutch housing for the dragsters I built, but then it became apparent there was a much larger problem that needed to be solved. A problem that threatened the very existence of the future of organized drag racing.
The problem arose from the thousands of factory stockers, that headed for the drag strip on the weekends, with GM factory production cast iron flywheels and clutches. When these parts were over-revved and stressed beyond their design limits, catastrophic explosions occurred, equal to the force of a hand grenade. The shrapnel cut through the thin die-cast housing, installed by GM as an adaptor, but never intended to hold back an exploding flywheel. The shrapnel ripped right through the car’s body, cutting off arms and legs if they happened to be in the way and into the grandstand, causing injury and death to many hundreds of spectators in the path of this destructive force. This happened at hundreds of drag races all over the country, every weekend, for many years before enforcement became mandatory. These explosions are still occurring today. when uninformed racers, mill or turn away cast iron from flywheels to make them lighter.
The Hydro-Form process has the ability to deep form, quarter inch thick steel plate into a replacement for the factory, aluminum die cast housing, With this process, the formed part has all the ductility and strength to withstand a flywheel explosion. It was also very light in weight, making this method the one of choice for containment of these devastating explosions.
To say that the Lakewood Housing was overwhelmingly received by the racing community would be an under-statement. The 'Lakewood' as it is still most often referred to, has been credited with saving the lives of many thousands of racers and spectators, over the years. To this day, throughout the country, race car builders and racers can be heard ordering this product at their local speed shop,"Give me a "Lakewood" for my 56 Chevy", they are referring to the Lakewood hydro-formed (scatter shield) bell-housing by its shortest, identifiable name. To most everyone involved in the high performance world, the name 'Lakewood' is a scatter-shield, not a city in Ohio.
So obviously, when I named the company after the city where I grew up, little did I know that in the years to come, at least in the Hi-Performance Industry, the name Lakewood would become generic from the popularity of the Bellhousing/scattershield we produced, rather than a company that was known from being associated with the city from where it resided. Consequently, my concern that we would always be explaining that Lakewood was east of Cleveland, was without merit.
Lakewood, the company, was also the home away from home and repair station for many of the friends I made while on the road racing, not only on the West coast, but also in Florida and on the East coast West coast. Dragster teams traveling during the summer to race in the Midwest and on the East Coast, found Lakewood Chassis Co, (as it was called before the name change) a convenient stop to freshen up or repair what was broken the week prior, for the next race.
On any given week during the summer, ”TV ‘Tommy” Ivo, The Frantic Four (Weekly, Fox, Holding & Rivero), Jack Williams, Bob Sullivan, Jimmy Nix, Val LaPort, Art Malone, Romeo & Jet Car Bob Smith, Don the Beachcomber, Marvin Schwartz, just to name a few. . During the summer, it seemed there were always enough dragsters on hand for at least an 8-car show at the local drag strip.
Tommy Ivo recently posted this photo and his remembrance of the Lakewood days, on 1320.com.
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It started out on East 9th and Euclid, downtown Cleveland, 'live' on the Mike Douglas National TV show, where Jet Car Bob Smith and "Gentleman Joe" Schubeck, staged what was close to being the biggest racing calamity ever caught on live TV. Schubeck smoked the tires for a short burn out while Smith lit the afterburner, but left it on, maybe a second too long. Just as Mike Douglas asked the question of Drag News' Mike Doherty, " Do these cars have good brakes?" Jet car Bob went through the barricade of police on horseback and luckily managed to cross Euclid avenue in mid morning traffic, narrowly missing a broadside collision of colossal proportions. Schubeck, so caught up in Smith's faupah, almost followed, but with a last minute screech of brakes, he manager to stop, just as Mike Douglas said, "I guess that answers my question about the brakes." The two ended up at Dragway 42, in West Salem, Ohio before a packed house, for the final showdown.
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RIVERSIDE RACEWAY, HOT ROD MAGAZINE'S EAST VS. WEST FUEL MEET
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"OH, TO BE A FLAGMAN IN THOSE DAYS"
Not all the time, but once in a while, a flag man starter would get a good drag race underway. Such was the case
with this start against Don Garlits. But not all starts were this even, in fact, there were so many bad starts and so many heated arguments in those early days that being a starter wasn't always good for your health. The starter had the authority to disqualify a jump start or even re-run a race, if he thought the circumstances called for it. But then, a man by the name of Riley, solved all the starting problems when he introduced the Christmas Tree.
Photo by: Jeff Jarvis